Sunday, 17 November 2013

AGENT ELLI AND THE TRICKY LANGUAGE THAT IS RUSSIAN (PART 2)

Agent Elli and the Tricky Language that is Russian

(Part 2)

(SORRY FOR THE MIXED-UP FONTS, BLOGGER IS PLAYING SILLY BUGGERS)

There are four important points to note about
the manner in which Gouzenko came to learn about Agent Elli: one, Gouzenko and Luibimov
would have been speaking in Russian; two, in all probability their command of English
would have been basic at best (certainly Gouzenko’s was); three, these
conversations took place at night when people are tired (and maybe even a
little drunk?); and four, I suspect in a beleaguered and blacked-out Moscow the
lighting in their office (candles? oil-lamps?) would have been inadequate. The
upshot is that this is the ideal environment for mistakes to be made.

So what did Gouzenko learn about Agent Elli
during these night time chats? Well, I guess the most basic is that the Agent’s
codename was ‘Elli’. Everyone has assumed that Gouzenko got this right: unfortunately
I don’t think Gouzenko (or Black) did!

In 1942 when
they were discussing ‘Elli’, Gouzenko and Liubimov would have been speaking in
Russian and when he came to be debriefed by the Canadian authorities three
years later it is highly likely that Gouzenko would have used the same Russian
pronunciation for the name he saw on Liubimov’s decrypts, Элли. In fact
this is the Cyrillic rendering of the English word ‘Ally’ but as
Gouzenko’s English was poor he wouldn’t have known the word and would have
pronounced it phonetically as Elli. This
mistake was not picked up by Black and is one which created a lot of subsequent
confusion.

Professor
Christopher Andrew in his authorised history of MI5 (The Defence of the
Realm: The Authorized History of MI5) states that that
‘El’ is the Russian pronunciation of the letter ‘L’ (correct) and hence that
ELLI in Russian translates as the plural of the English letter ‘L’. I am
reliably informed by a native-speaking Russian linguist that this is ‘nonsense’:
no Russian would ever refer to double-L as Elli. Moreover, I doubt the Soviets
would have been so stupid as to give such an important agent a code-name made
up of his initials. Unfortunately Professor Andrew uses this ‘ELLI = Russian
double-L’ hypothesis to corroborate his contention that Leo Long (who I’ll
return to later) is the real identity of Agent Elli. Understandable I suppose:
without this supporting ‘evidence’ the Leo Long surmise seems somewhat
threadbare.

Of course, my
Agent Ally hypothesis might be wrong and there are other possibilities. If, for
instance, the decrypts shown to Gouzenko by Liubimov had been handwritten – a
strong possibility given that most of the documents Gouzenko took with him when
he defected were handwritten, making them difficult to decipher – and
remembering that this was taking place at night in an ill-lit room it could be
that the agent’s name wasn’t Elli (Элли ) but the similar-looking Eppi (Эппи). The one other possibility (the
one my own Agent Elli refers to in ‘Faktion’) is that Elli was simply a
shortened form of ‘Elijah’!

However I am
as confident as anyone can be the Agent Elli was actually Agent Ally, a very
apt cryptonym for someone as highly placed and as committed to socialist
revolution as this spy.

This ‘Agent Ally’ contention is reinforced by
there being two Agent Ellis.

Elli is
recognised in Russian as being a woman’s name and, interestingly, the codename
‘Elli’ (sometimes rendered as ‘Ellie’) had already been assigned to one of the
Soviet’s female spies in Canada.
Gouzenko identified two agents called
Elli, the first of whom turned out to be a woman, Elli (or Ellie) being the
cryptonym of Kathleen Willsher, who worked as a confidential secretary to the
British High Commissioner in Canada, Malcolm MacDonald (Willsher was
subsequently identified and arrested). That the Soviets used the same code name
of two agents (one a man and one a woman) has generally been dismissed as ‘just
one of those things’, but I don’t think it was: the names weren’t the same. There was an Agent Ellie (female) and an Agent
Ally (male). Different names but rendered in exactly the same way in Russian.

The final piece of mal-translation confusing the search for Agent
Elli is the phrase used by Gouzenko: ‘ou nego shto-to Russkoe’ which Black translated as ‘having
something of the Russian about him’. This has been used to suggest that Agent
Elli had Russian antecedents, but in fact the phrase is so vague as to be
almost meaningless and should have prompted Black to ask for clarification.
Unfortunately he didn’t. Nelli’s translation would have been the much more
general ‘had a Russian connection’.

The journalist Chapman Pincher presents a
coherent set of arguments when he suggests that Elli is Roger Hollis – Hollis
worked for MI5 from 1939, eventually becoming Director-General in 1956 (see
Pincher’s Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders, and
Cover-ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain for details). Pincher
refers to the ‘ou nego shto-to Russkoe’
description of Elli and suggests that it indicates that Elli had
pre-Revolutionary connections with Russia (Nelli disputes this: in her opinion
the phrase is so ambiguous as to invite several, equally plausible,
interpretations). Apparently the Hollis family is able to trace its lineage
back to Peter the Great. The difficulty here is that Hollis’s Russian
antecedents were tenuous to say the least and I am doubtful they would have
stimulated gossip in the GRU’s Moscow headquarters.

But my biggest problem with the ‘Hollis is
Elli’ hypothesis is that Hollis would have been too junior in the period
running up to 1942 (when Gouzenko first heard of Elli) to be regarded as the
Soviets’ most important intelligence asset in Britain.

****

These pieces of mis-translation and mis-interpretation have confused
the hunt for Agent Elli with none of the proposed candidates quite fitting the
description provided by Gouzenko: that he was a man; a committed Marxist; recruited
by the GRU not the NKVD; had a strong Russian connection; had, from early 1942,
access to Britain’s most sensitive of secrets; and was ready and willing and
able to provide the USSR with these secrets. A man who truly warrants the cryptonym
Agent Ally.

About Me

Hi, my name is Rod Rees and I'm a writer of science fiction/fantasy. My first book 'The Demi-Monde: Winter' is due for publishing on Quercus on 6th January 2011. It's being billed as a 'steampunk thriller'. Aside from writing my other ambitions are for my two brilliant daughters to be everything they can be (and that's a lot!)and for my wonderful wife Nelli to be as successful as she deserves to be (her book on glass jewellery making is out in November). I HATE surveillance and the intrusion of the State in our lives. I believe in Kondratieff Cycles and that history beats crystal balls, astrology and tarot all to hell when it comes to predicting the future. I believe there's nothing new in the world, it's all just a re-tread.